How Sara McMann went from bully-beating to inspirational speaking

At Sara McMann’s middle school there was this girl.

She was from a wealthy family, popular without being particularly well-liked – the kind of girl who’s a terror at that age. She made up rumors about other girls. She entertained herself by destroying reputations. She took special aim at the girls who were not as popular or from families as wealthy as hers, so it was only a matter of time before she got around to McMann, who was from a poor family known to be a little rough around the edges.

When one of McMann’s friends warned this girl that maybe it was a bad idea to pick on McMann, who already was well acquainted with violence at that point, the girl laughed it off, mocking McMann and the very idea that she should be concerned about her.

“That was the end of the school year,” McMann told MMAjunkie. “The next school year, I came back and broke her nose.”

This anecdote was first relayed to me by a mutual acquaintance who just happened to be a classmate of McMann’s at that school. She’s an adult now, in her 30s, and she still remembers the day that McMann beat up the school bully as “a real feel-good moment.” Especially as a disaffected teenager, it struck her as a moment where life seemed briefly fair, where people got what they deserved. This, to hear McMann tell it, was kind of the point.

“That’s exactly what that was aiming to do,” McMann said. “She was a girl who spread these rumors just to destroy other girls’ reputations. There was one girl who, her family was rich, but she wasn’t quite as cool. This other girl made up these mean nicknames for her and started these terrible rumors that weren’t true, and she just thought she’d get away with it because she was the popular girl. I was a poor girl with nothing to lose. I didn’t care if I got transferred. I just felt like, listen, you’re probably going to get your way with a lot of things in life, but you don’t get to get away with this.”

That was how the future Olympic silver medalist solved the problem of being an underdog in life back then. She didn’t get to do the extracurricular activities other kids did, she said. She never recalls going to a school dance, “because that stuff cost money.”

McMann didn’t have money, but she did have violence. She still has it, though in a much different form, and she’s still finding ways to use it that inspire and help others, only now without getting kicked out of school for it.

So when a man named Mike Kelly approached her about visiting the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to talk to the kids there, and when he explained that he couldn’t pay her a cent for her time, McMann didn’t have to think too hard before telling him she’d do it. Once Kelly explained what the situation was in Pine Ridge, consistently one of the nation’s poorest Indian reservations, McMann knew that she wanted to help.

“For me, having come from a similar type background where I was working from scratch, starting from the negative side in life, that’s something I could relate to,” McMann said. “I really believe that one positive influence in a kid’s life – not necessarily me, but maybe a wrestling coach or guidance counselor, somebody – can change the whole course of a child’s life, because they’re so malleable at that age. I know I was like that.”

It turns out that Kelly knew it too. He first visited Pine Ridge shortly after the September 11 attacks. A beloved football coach whom he had been very close to had been killed that day, he said, and several people from the company his wife worked for died in the World Trade Center. After all that trauma, Kelly said, he and his wife wanted to “get off the grid” for a little while, so they went to South Dakota.

While there, Kelly, who works with kids with disabilities, did some research on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the southern part of the state and decided that he had to visit.

“I was moved by what I saw,” Kelly said. “You keep hearing about the destitute population, how poor it is there. And it was impoverished, probably the most impoverished place I’d been to in the country. But the people there, they were just so wonderful that I said, ‘I want to come back and help.’”

He didn’t have the money to write them a check, but what he did have was time and energy. He put both to work in trying to find figures who might inspire the kids of Pine Ridge, who seemed to him in danger of slipping into the hopelessness of lifelong poverty, giving up on any chance of improving their lives and giving into the temptations of drugs or alcohol, merely to numb the pain of existence.

The most popular sport on the reservation is basketball. But, Kelly said, “I’d probably have a better chance of finding Jimmy Hoffa and the Loch Ness monster having dinner together than I would of convincing Kobe Bryant or Lebron James to go do something like this without paying them.”

So he looked at the second-most popular sport, which is usually a toss-up between wrestling and boxing and, increasingly, mixed martial arts. That just happened to be right in Kelly’s wheelhouse.

“I was moved three times in my life,” Kelly said. “The first time I heard a Beatles song, the first time I saw my wife, and the first time I saw UFC 1 on a video tape that I found in the bargain bin in a Blockbuster Video, circa 1997.”

He set out to find fighters who would be willing to visit the reservation for a few days, but not just any fighters. He wanted ones who the kids there could relate to, ones who could stand as living proof that starting at the bottom does not doom a person to stay there. He started with former Bellator fighter Dan Hornbuckle, himself a member of the Eastern Band Cherokee tribe. When he learned more about McMann’s upbringing and her past, including the murder of her brother in 1999 and the death of her fiancee in a car accident in 2004, he knew he’d found someone who could speak honestly about what it meant to persevere and overcome.

“I’m very selective with who I pick,” Kelly said. “I’d never have Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian show up to the reservation. They haven’t achieved what someone like Sara has, and they haven’t started where she started.”

That’s the message McMann brought to the kids of Pine Ridge when she visited three different schools there earlier this month, she said. The often media shy UFC women’s bantamweight has made it a point to keep her private life private when dealing with a media hungry for pre-fight sound bites, she admitted, but it’s in these talks where she feels like the personal details of her life and her struggle are actually put to good use.

“Truthfully, there’s things I revealed in those talks that the media doesn’t know about,” McMann said. “When I’m talking to these kids and revealing those intimate details of my life, it’s because I can look out in the crowd and see kids nodding their heads. They’ve been in some of those same situations. That feels like a more pure reason to talk about it, because I’m up there opening up, talking about some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to face, and talking about them publicly. But if I’m asked about those things and it’s to promote a fight, that feels more sleazy to me. It’s like I’m selling those intimate details of my life rather than giving them to people who can use them to help change their lives. There’s a different feeling for me. The intention is very important to me.”

It was important to Kelly, as well. That’s part of the reason why he wanted McMann, he said. Not only did she conduct free seminars for a local fight team – The Rez Rumblerz, coached by Dave Michaud Sr., the father of UFC welterweight David Michaud – she also spoke to auditoriums full of kids who were clearly touched by what she had to say, according to Kelly.

“At two of the three schools she spoke at, and the kids initiated this themselves, which is kind of rare for teenagers, they gathered around her and sang a ceremonial song paying her respect,” Kelly said. “I’m in my 50s and there’s not much that moves me – I guess I’ve become cynical in some respects – but I had to hold back the tears.”

As for McMann, she was “blown away” by the song, but possibly even more impressed that so many teenagers actually seemed interested in what she had to say. After growing up believing that violence was the only sure way to get people’s attention, she got to see that her story in itself has the power to help change people’s lives.

“I think it helps that I’m not some person who’s had all the right things and done everything perfectly and I just trained really hard and things fell together,” McMann said. “I mean, I’ve taken some hits in life. I know some of them have too. I even met some kids who were legally emancipated from their parents, living on their own, and they were still in high school. I felt like I could be a good example that you don’t have to have all the right things in life, all the doors already open for you, in order to do great things. In fact, I truly believe that a lot of people who do great things, many of them have come from harder backgrounds and took some of those hits in life.”

Having heard McMann’s story, maybe there are some kids in Pine Ridge with reason to believe it too.